I finished up my first blog post for InsideRIA this morning and thought I’d share on here as well. The topic I decided to cover is “Getting started with Spark skins”. I hope it helps someone out and I look forward to posting more on InsideRIA in the future.

So I was perusing the Adobe site last night and I suddenly found myself saying, “Hey, that’s a picture of me on adobe.com!” The very nice people running the Adobe Design Center have posted another chapter (chapter 10 – Preparing and building microsites) of my book so I just wanted to take a second (again) to publicly thank Jen, Sara and anyone else involved in making it happen.

I’d like to take a minute give a BIG thanks to Jen deHaan and Sara DiGregorio at Adobe for taking time out of their recent days to talk with me and my publisher about including an excerpt from my book on adobe.com. I’m obviously very excited about this and I hope that the excerpt, which is chapter 4, will peak your interest enough to check out the rest of the book.

Office managers can thank Dan Ferguson for helping reduce their workers’ productivity. He pioneered the concept of the “advergame”: easy-to-play, casual videogames that pitch a product, service or company’s brand. Often played within a web browser and running in Flash, these innocuous looking games can suck up a lot of hours during one’s workday – and that’s how they are intentionally devised.

Ferguson began making such time-wasters when he, along with his business partner Mike Bielinski, created Elf Bowling as a promotional tool for their design company. Released in November 1999, it capitalized on the holiday season and served over 7 million downloads. Buoyed by this success, Ferguson and Bielinski sold their company and formed a new one in 2001, which would marry their ad design experience and newfound game design skills: Blockdot.

Since then, Blockdot has made over 800 games hawking its clients’ wares and names. Blockdot cranks out one to two games per week. This modest-sized company (they employ just over 50 employees at their Dallas office) could likely be considered the most prolific game developer in history.